


Silhouettes

by wss_holmes



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Angst, Ficlet, Gen, M/M, Pre-Season/Series 03
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-15
Updated: 2014-11-15
Packaged: 2018-02-25 12:49:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 653
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2622383
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wss_holmes/pseuds/wss_holmes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock is still fighting The Network deep in Serbia, but manages to pen a journal entry describing his experiences thus far.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Silhouettes

Day 693: 

—Daily Vitals Check—

Blood Pressure: 80/55 mm/Hg  
10 breaths a minute   
Heart Rate: 50 bpm   
Core Body Temperature: 35.8 degrees Celsius (96.4 degrees Fahrenheit)   
Oxygen Saturation: Unknown, but believed to be dropping   
Sanity: Currently intact 

Notes: Getting worse. 

 

Have you ever seen pictures from the American bombing of Hiroshima? In World War II? Horrible. Not really pictures of the bombing itself or the famous photograph of the man piloting the Enola Gay but... The aftermath. Thousands of square miles just... Barren. Of course, if you do a Google search of the bombing you see plenty of pictures of people with horrendous injuries, flesh peeling away clean from bone, literally melting away... Then you get a handful of the people standing around cluelessly, looking among the wreckage, maybe for a glimmer of the life they once basked in merely 20 minutes ago... But there's photographs I find to be more meaningful than any grainy black-and-white image of a girl crying fretfully in her mother's arms while her hair falls off in literal chunks... No... No, it's those pictures that I can't rip from my mind, no matter how I hard try. Those photos of the black coal forms of bodies burned into the concrete, an image of a body pressed on the ground. Blackened silhouettes... It used to be a person, and that person used to go through cellular respiration and their epidermis would shed itself occasionally and their liver would take in and store bile and glucose... Everything was... Alive, and functioning... The bodies are obviously unidentifiable. No way to tell. Maybe John would try to think of life stories for these people, not wanting their tragic story to go unnoticed. Sounds like something he would do. He always wants to chronicle everything. For instance, he might say that one person, whose silhouetted image was burned into a set of steps, was bringing home groceries for her family. Or maybe, that another man was on his way to buy milk. I think he thought of that gem while he was cross with me... For reasons you can probably guess. Perhaps... One man had just won the lottery, or another man was on the verge of some scientific breakthrough. Maybe that same man was an excellent fighter, and maybe he was intelligent. He could have been well-versed in chemistry, but not in reading emotions. What if this man had a friend? Not many, just the one. They could have been an excellent duo, thick as thieves. Of course if John was telling this story, he'd have to bring in his romantics and say that maybe the now-burnt-up man had accidentally put his friend's life in horrible peril. Well of course this man, the Fallen Man, had to save his friend's life, right? Simply no other option. He had to do it. Duty calls upon the strongest and reduces them to the weakest. Maybe the Fallen Man was shielding the friend from the blast. Maybe the Fallen Man had sacrificed everything for the friend, and was then left with nothing but a piercing and all-consuming loneliness for two years and counting. Maybe the Fallen Man is still alive. 

I think that's probably all I've become to John now. I'm a silhouette, once living and laughing beside him, now an empty, blackened figure on the sidewalk. Can he even remember my face without relying on a photograph? It baffles the mind how we could spend years together, seeing each other nearly daily, and yet there's still a possibility that my face is a faded and blurred image in his mind. Maybe he'll go somewhere, remember something, and it will throw light on to my form, the blur will dissipate for a few weeks. But with each passing day, that blur will slowly creep back on, softening the once clear, sharp angles of my face...

Blood loss is making me esoteric.


End file.
